Posted Dec 13, 2023
In today’s digital age, email has become an integral part of business communication. But with the ever-growing issue of spam, spam traps, and fraud, verifying the validity of email addresses has become a critical task to ensure you stay in compliance with email providers like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc. One of the ways you can stay in compliance is by verifying the validity of your email addresses to ensure there are unwanted emails on your list.
In this comprehensive guide, we will explore some of the reasons an email can become unwanted, how to effectively verify the validity of an email, and how to protect yourself against email list bombs and scams.
If you are a small business aiming to maintain email deliverability and hygiene, this guide will equip you with the knowledge and tools necessary to confidently identify and validate email addresses.
Verifying email address validity is essential for any business and it breaks down into five main areas:
Reducing Bounce Rates: Verifying email addresses ensures that the emails you send reach valid and active recipients. This significantly reduces bounce rates caused by invalid or non-existent email addresses, which can negatively impact your sender reputation. We will talk more about types of bounces in the next section.
Finding Spam Traps: Validating emails is essential because it also helps identify and eliminate potential spam traps from your contact lists. These traps, often disguised as inactive or abandoned email addresses, can severely impact your sender reputation and deliverability. By utilizing email validation services or tools, businesses can efficiently detect and remove these harmful addresses, safeguarding their email marketing campaigns.
Maintaining Sender Reputation: Hitting high rates of invalid emails can harm your sender reputation and deliverability. Regularly verifying email addresses helps maintain a positive reputation with internet service providers (ISPs) and email service providers (ESPs), increasing the chances of your emails reaching the intended recipients’ inboxes. By not verifying emails you could be taking a risk to your domain and IP reputation.
Cost Efficiency: Sending emails to invalid addresses is a waste of resources, including time and money spent on marketing campaigns. Address verification helps optimize resources by focusing efforts on a genuine audience, improving the return on investment (ROI) of email marketing campaigns. It also makes your stats look worse than they really are due to mailing people that will never open in the first place.
Compliance and Legal Considerations: Email address verification helps businesses comply with anti-spam laws and regulations. Sending emails to inaccurate or unauthorized addresses can lead to legal issues and damage your brand’s reputation.
When you are verifying the validity of an email list, these are some of the types of bad emails we want to watch out for:
Spam Traps: Spam traps first made their appearance in the late 90s and early 2000 right as the internet and email marketing were becoming mainstream. These were email addresses created by ISPs (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc.) that were designed to trap people who are scrapping email lists from the internet.
If you scrapped one of these traps and emailed it the ISP knew that email address didn’t opt-in to your list and they would then ding your domain and IP reputation. Enough dings and your emails landed in the junk folder or just blocked altogether.
Since then Spam Traps have evolved immensely using AI and learning software. These traps are now so smart they can activate if someone abandons their email account by not logging in after so many months. Emailing a spam trap can be the equivalent of getting 50 to 100 spam complaints against your email reputation. They are VERY bad for your lists.
Hard and Soft Bounces: A bounce is when you send an email but that email gets rejected by the client-server and “bounced” away. These emails never even make it to the person’s spam or promo folders because they failed one or more checks when the server got the email.
Soft bounces are the most common and typical reasons an email may soft bounce can include:
Hard bounces are worse than soft bounces. In some cases depending on the kind of hard bounce it can impact your domain and reputation in the same way someone spamming the email could. Here are some reasons an email may hard bounce:
Malformed Emails: I know we touched on this briefly before but a malformed email is another one you want to watch out for. These are email addresses with typos in them like one “O” in Yahoo (JohnSmith@yaho.com) or missing the “a” in Gmail (JohnSmith@gmil.com). A malformed email can cause an ISP to bounce mail and hit your domain reputation.
Role-Based Emails: These are typically Info@ or Admin@ email addresses. While these can be valid email addresses you typically want to avoid emailing them due to low engagement rate and high spam rate.
Knowing what can make an address bad is half the battle let’s move on to ways we can validate an email address
The easiest and most effective way to validate new opt-in email addresses is to send them a double opt-in email. Most mass email senders will have an email template you can use for a double opt-in. These emails will contain a button or link asking the person to prove they are real and that they want your marketing materials.
The second best way to validate emails is to run them through an email validation software like Zerobounce.net. This type of software can run a ping report against the email address you wish to validate and the server will give back info about the email. Info like if it’s a spam trap or a hardbounce email.
This is crucial information to know before you make the mistake of emailing them. Email validation software does come with a cost but that cost comes with a piece of mind that you are not taking unnecessary risk with your domain.
The last thing you can do to validate emails is to look for signs of engagement. If people are opening and clicking there is a good chance they are real. If someone doesn’t open a piece of mail in more than 90 days it is time to consider an alternative approach.
In conclusion, validating emails for marketing purposes is not merely a recommended practice; it is a critical step toward achieving success in your campaigns. By ensuring the accuracy and legitimacy of your email lists through validation processes, businesses can significantly enhance their deliverability rates, improve engagement with genuine recipients, and safeguard their sender reputation.
Removing invalid, inactive, or potentially harmful email addresses minimizes the risk of bounces, spam traps, and wasted resources, allowing marketers to focus their efforts on a genuinely interested and responsive audience.
Ultimately, email validation stands as a foundational pillar in fostering robust, efficient, and successful marketing strategies, maximizing the impact and effectiveness of your email campaigns.
Schedule a complimentary call with us below and let’s discuss your unique situation and email marketing needs.